# Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Opus 5.5

> Side-by-side benchmark comparison for Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5.5 across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, multilingual, and math tasks.

- Canonical page: https://benchlm.ai/compare/claude-opus-4-8-vs-claude-opus-5-5
- Last updated: September 22, 2026

- Shared sourced benchmarks: 7
- HTML indexing: indexable
- Ranking lane: BenchAlign v5

## Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Opus 5.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Opus 4.8 only makes more sense when its price, context window, or workload-specific category wins matter more than the overall score.

## Summary

- Claude Opus 5.5 leads overall 81.03 to 72.05.
- The clearest category separation is in reasoning, where the averages are 55.5 for Claude Opus 4.8 and 78.5 for Claude Opus 5.5.
- The biggest single benchmark swing is OSWorld 2.0 in Agentic, with scores of 20.6% and 48.7%.
- Claude Opus 5.5 is the cheaper option on output tokens, which matters if you expect large responses or heavy interactive use.

## Model Snapshot

| Property | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 |
|----------|----------|----------|
| Creator | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Reasoning | Reasoning | Reasoning |
| Context | 1M | 1M |
| Overall Score | 72.05 | 81.03 |
| Benchmarks Covered | 38 | 47 |
| Pricing (input/output) | $5.00 / $25.00 | $4.00 / $20.00 |

## Category Breakdown

### Agentic

- Winner: Claude Opus 5.5
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 63.2 (Supported · #15/157)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: 82.9 (Supported · #1/157)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| Terminal-Bench 3.0 | 21.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 74.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| BrowseComp | 84.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| DeepSearchQA | 93.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| OSWorld-Verified | 83.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Finance Agent v2 | 53.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MCP Atlas | 82.2% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon | 59.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Gert Labs | 72.97% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| ResearchClawBench | 21.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 20.6% | 48.7% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 71.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0 | Coming soon | 66.40% | Coming soon |
| Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 | Coming soon | 58.7% | Coming soon |
| AutomationBench | Coming soon | 40.0% | Coming soon |
| HLE w/ tools | Coming soon | 67.7% | Coming soon |
| LAB all-pass (Harvey held-out) | Coming soon | 8.3% | Coming soon |
| LAB criterion-pass (Harvey held-out) | Coming soon | 91.2% | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon-Verified | Coming soon | 77.8% | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon Verified Pass@3 | Coming soon | 82.4% | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon Verified Pass³ | Coming soon | 72.2% | Coming soon |
| Toolathlon Verified avg. turns | Coming soon | 26.9 turns | Coming soon |

### Coding

- Winner: Claude Opus 5.5
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 66.4 (Supported · #14/159)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: 80.1 (Supported · #2/159)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| SWE-bench Verified | 88.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench Pro | 69.2% | 89.9% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| SWE Multilingual | 84.4% | 93.9% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| SWE Multimodal | 38.4% | 61.4% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 74.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| cursorBench31 | 58.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| cursorBench32 | 62.3% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| FrontierCode 1.1 Main | 46.5% | 54.4% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| LiveCodeBench (Vals) | 87.8% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 88.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| cursorBench40 | Coming soon | 57.8% | Coming soon |
| DeepSWE | Coming soon | 74.2% | Coming soon |
| FrontierCode 1.1 Extended | Coming soon | 63.6% | Coming soon |
| FrontierSWE v2 | Coming soon | 62.3% | Coming soon |
| ProgramBench | Coming soon | 91.2% | Coming soon |

### Reasoning

- Winner: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 55.5 (#15/17)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: 78.5 (#4/17)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| ARC-AGI-2 | 72.1% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| ARC-AGI-3 | 1.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |

### Multimodal & Grounded

- Winner: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 87.7 (#4/50)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: 88.8 (#3/50)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| OfficeQA Pro | 66.2% | 67.7% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| ScreenSpot Pro | 87.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| CharXiv | 89.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| CharXiv w/o tools | 80.5% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| Chartography (tools) | Coming soon | 89.0% | Coming soon |
| Chartography (no tools) | Coming soon | 64.4% | Coming soon |
| BenchCAD Vision2Code (no tools) | Coming soon | 0.730 | Coming soon |
| BenchCAD Vision2Code (tools) | Coming soon | 0.962 | Coming soon |
| Biomedical image analysis | Coming soon | 71.4% | Coming soon |
| OfficeQA | Coming soon | 78.9% | Coming soon |

### Knowledge

- Winner: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 71.3 (Supported · #11/189)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: 81.8 (Estimated · #4/189)

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| GPQA | 93.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| GPQA-D | 93.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HLE | 57.9% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HLE w/o tools | 49.8% | 64.4% | Claude Opus 5.5 |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 92.4% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| MMLU-Pro (Vals) | 89.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| HealthBench (raw) | Coming soon | 68.1% | Coming soon |
| HealthBench (length-adjusted) | Coming soon | 60.6% | Coming soon |
| HealthBench Professional | Coming soon | 65.6% | Coming soon |
| HealthBench Professional (raw) | Coming soon | 77.1% | Coming soon |
| BioMysteryBench (human-solvable) | Coming soon | 89.3% | Coming soon |
| BioMysteryBench (human-difficult) | Coming soon | 50.0% | Coming soon |
| SpatialBench Verified | Coming soon | 72.0% | Coming soon |
| SingleCellBench | Coming soon | 61.2% | Coming soon |
| Morphology-to-molecule matching | Coming soon | 34.0% | Coming soon |
| Medicinal chemistry | Coming soon | 63.5% | Coming soon |
| Protein Design | Coming soon | 60.2% | Coming soon |
| Protein Design library ranking | Coming soon | 56.0% | Coming soon |
| De novo protein-binder design | Coming soon | 82.6% | Coming soon |
| Protocols (troubleshooting) | Coming soon | 73.7% | Coming soon |
| Protocols (understanding) | Coming soon | 69.0% | Coming soon |

### Multilingual

- Winner: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| INCLUDE | 87.6% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| GMMLU | Coming soon | 94.3% | Coming soon |
| MILU | Coming soon | 93.1% | Coming soon |

### Instruction Following

- Winner: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 74 (#60/124)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: Coming soon

### Mathematics

- Winner: Coming soon
- Claude Opus 4.8 public-lane score: 65.2 (#2/7)
- Claude Opus 5.5 public-lane score: Coming soon

| Benchmark | Claude Opus 4.8 | Claude Opus 5.5 | Winner |
|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|
| USAMO 2026 | 96.7% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| FrontierMath v2 (Tiers 1-3) | 47.241% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| FrontierMath v2 (Tier 4) | 31.250% | Coming soon | Coming soon |
| ArXivMath Aug. 2026 (no tools) | Coming soon | 91.2% | Coming soon |
| ArXivMath Aug. 2026 (tools) | Coming soon | 96.9% | Coming soon |

## FAQ

### Which is better overall, Claude Opus 4.8 or Claude Opus 5.5?

Claude Opus 5.5 is ahead overall on BenchLM right now.

### Where is the biggest gap between Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5.5?

The widest category gap is in reasoning, where the averages are 55.5 for Claude Opus 4.8 and 78.5 for Claude Opus 5.5.

### How many benchmarks does Claude Opus 4.8 cover on BenchLM?

Claude Opus 4.8 currently has 38 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

### How many benchmarks does Claude Opus 5.5 cover on BenchLM?

Claude Opus 5.5 currently has 47 sourced benchmark scores on BenchLM.

## Related Comparisons

- [Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Fable 5.1](/compare/claude-fable-5-1-vs-claude-opus-4-8)
- [Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Fable 5.1](/compare/claude-fable-5-1-vs-claude-opus-5-5)
- [Claude Opus 4.8 vs GPT-6 Astra](/compare/claude-opus-4-8-vs-gpt-6-astra)
- [Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Astra](/compare/claude-opus-5-5-vs-gpt-6-astra)

## Explore More

- [Claude Opus 4.8 profile](/models/claude-opus-4-8)
- [Claude Opus 5.5 profile](/models/claude-opus-5-5)
- [Compare Pricing](/llm-pricing)
- [Alternative Finder](/tools/alternative-finder)
- [LLM Selector](/tools/llm-selector)
- [Overall Rankings](/best/overall)